This article was downloaded by: [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok]

On: 15 August 2013, At: 18:00

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer
House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Economy and Society

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reso20

Canguilhem amid the cyborgs

a
Ian Hacking
a
University of Toronto
Published online: 28 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Ian Hacking (1998) Canguilhem amid the cyborgs, Economy and Society, 27:2-3, 202-216, DOI:
10.1080/03085149800000014

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085149800000014

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of
the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied
upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall
not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other
liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 Canguilhem amid the
cyborgs

Ian Hacking

Abstract

Georges Canguilhem's 1947 lecture, 'Machine and organism', is a rich source of ideas
for thinking about the relationships between living organisms and machines. He takes
all tools and machines to be extensions of the body, and part of life itself (which does
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

not make machines any more good or bad than every living organism is good or bad).
'These insights are updated with a discussion of cyborgs. An account is given of the
original idea of the cyborg (Clynes and Kline 1960), and of its transformations in
science fiction and at the hands of Donna Haraway and Andrew Pickering. Canguil-
hem is profoundly anti-Cartesian, but on account of his vision of life which breaks
down the old barriers between natural and artificial, mind and body, manufactured
and created.

Keywords: Georges Canguilhem; cyborg; Descartes; Manfred Clynes; Donna

Haraway; Andrew Pickering.

. . . toutes les choses qui sont a r t ~ c i e l l e s ,sont . . . naturelles. Car, par exemple,
lorsqu'une montre marque les heures par le mojten des roues dont elle est,faite, cela
ne lui est pus moins nature1 qu'il est a un arbre de p r o h i r e ses fruits. (all things
that are artificial are . . . natural. Thus, for example, when a watch keeps time
by means of the wheels of which it is made, that is no less natural for it than
it is for a tree to produce its fruit.)
(Descartes, Principles r?fPhilosophy, Part iv, $203)
Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the differ-
ence between natural and artificial . . . and many other distinctions that apply
to organisms and machines.
(Haraway [1985]1991: 152)

U n outil, une muchine ce sont des organes, et des organes sont des outils ou des
machines. (Tools and machines are kinds of organs, and organs are kinds of
tools or machines).
(Canguilhem 1952: 143)

Economy and Society K)lume 27 Numbers 2G3 May 1998: 202-216

0Routledge 1998 0308-5 147
 Canguilhem amid the cyborgs 203

We honour Canguilhem on the first anniversary of his death. My paper is

centred on a happier anniversary, a golden one. Fifty years ago, 1946-7, Georges
Canguilhem gave three lectures at the Collkge de France. The second of these
was 'Machine et organisme', which was included in the volume titled La Con-
naissance de la vie. This lecture has a small cult following as a contribution to the
philosophy of technology. It deserves a far wider circulation than that.
Canguilhem's essay is, among other things, my chronological centre. It points
in one direction back to Descartes, and beyond him into the distant past. On the
other hand, it points on to 1960, to the present, to the future. A cryptic name
for a form of future life is the cyborg. That word has become trendy of late.
Despite its dread sound, the original cyborgs were not the denizens of science
fiction. The word was coined in 1960, as short for 'cybernetic organism'. It
referred to a living creature enhanced by computer-controlled bio-feedback
systems. T h e end product would allow a person to use brain and hands in space
flight, without having constantly to tinker with the environment in order to stay
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

alive. I shall return to cyborgs, but first Descartes.

It is commonly said, nowadays, that in philosophy we have overcome
Descartes, dualism, the ego and epistemology, thanks to the work of famous
men, Wittgenstein, Heidegger or less widely known earlier figures. Deeply
involved as I have been, from time to time, with the thought of Wittgenstein and
some of those earlier figures, such as Peirce, Herder and Hamann, I have never
been much impressed by the alleged termination of Descartes. In many respects
I find more in common between Wittgenstein and Descartes than difference. You
will see from my first two epigraphs that by highly selective quotation I can even
make Descartes sound like Donna Haraway, the feminist socialist student of the
sciences who delights in metaphor and the blurring of distinctions.
One thinker who did successfully undo one aspect of Cartesian thought is
Canguilhem, in this very paper, 'Machine and organism'. He did so with a novel
insight that has not been much attended to. He saw how central to Descartes was
the idea that animals are machines. Noam Chomsky has made clear to the
modern reader the importance of the species-specific abilities, and the claim that
language is peculiar to the human race. It marks a permanent genetic boundary,
sculpted by evolution, between humans and animals. Chomsky (1962) found in
Descartes just the man to be his predecessor, and used the title Cartesian Lin-
guistics. So that distinction is very present to recent thinking about language. The
more general doctrine, that animals are machines, does not rate high in today's
consciousness. We think of it as vaguely quaint. It summons up images of
Descartes kicking dogs downstairs.
Canguilhem (1952: 137), who was closer to the texts than most of us, had a
quite different vision. 'Descartes' theory of the animal machine is inseparable
from the "I think, therefore I am".' Matter is one; the soul is one; the soul judges;
animals cannot judge; animals are self-moving; so animals must be machines.
This idea 'legitimates the construction of a mechanical model of a living being.
The human body, too, is a machine, and hence the fascination with automata.'
Canguilhem thinks that is a deep mistake, and that, when it is revealed, dualism
 204 Ian Hacking

and the cogito are undermined. This is an internal demolition of Descartes, in

which what he says is taken literally, and not detextualized or deconstructed.
Here is an example. Since the body is a machine, it must in principle be poss-
ible to build a machine just like a human body. For technical reasons, we cannot
do it. In principle we could make a bird that would fly, but we are unable to make
small enough springs and coils to pull the trick off. So Descartes imagines God
- not man - making a perfect automaton for the body of a human being. Yet,
according to Canguilhem, this is not straightforward. The notion depends upon
an idea of God the fabricator and on there already being living creatures upon
which the machine is modelled. Neither we nor God get beyond teleology.
Machines are so made because we make them for a purpose, or in imitation of
something already alive. Canguilhem's fascination with the vital, with life as a
precondition, is evident here.
Canguilhem intimately connected teleology and life. In this respect we can see
him in the Aristotelian lineage. His was not a teleology which explained the exist-
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

ence of organisms by their purposes, but one in which we could understand an

aspect of an organism, or an organ, only by considering what the aspect or organ
was for, what purpose it served, in either the life or preservation of the organ-
ism, or of its species. Mechanism seems at odds with teleology, but in fact you
can correctly describe a machine made by people only if you say what it is for,
what it does, how it acts in order to achieve the intended end. And when we think
of living bodies as machines, Canguilhem argued that, in Descartes, even God
would make the animal-machine in imitation of a living being. In addition, we
could never understand the animal-machine by merely examining it; we would
have to consider its actions, and then consider the purpose of its parts with
respect to achieving the acts in which it engages.

Extending the body

Canguilhem passed from the thought that there is 'no difference between tele-
ology and mechanism' to a more sweeping statement, that 'tools and machines
are kinds of organs and organs are kinds of tools and machines'. We should
reflect on this. It is not literally true, in the dictionary meanings of the English
words, or of the French ones (outil, machine). We need to consider the various
metaphors that the statement expresses.
First, note that Descartes would have agreed with Canguilhem's statement in
its full literal sense. He wrote that the only difference between organisms and
machines is that machines have big parts, since they have to be made by hand.
T h e parts of organisms are 'ordinarily too small to be perceived by our senses'
(Principles iv: 203). He deliberately used the same words, tuyaux ou ressorts (tubes
or springs), for the inner workings of both machines and organisms. How
Descartes would have loved to have lived in our age of nanoengineering!
But it is not literally true in the dictionary senses that tools and machines are
organs, for tools and machines are made, and usually designed. At this point,
 Canguilhem amid the qyborgs 205

wrote Canguilhem (1952: 144), the Cartesian relation between machine and
organism is turned upside down. Machines must be made, and tended. Now I
omitted part of Haraway's sentence from my selective epigraph. In full she
wrote: 'Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the
difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and
externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms
and machines.' Canguilhem was writing in mid-century, not at its end, but one
suspects he would be more prudent. He did write that, 'the construction of elec-
tronic automata and servomechanisms shifts the relation between man and
machine without altering its direction' (1952: 144). Servomechanisms employ
feedback devices for purposes of self-regulation. Even by 1952 John von
Neumann was studying the abstract properties of self-reproducing automata, yet
we may still think that the distinction between the manufactured and the living-
reproducing is less blurred than Haraway implies. T h e important point here,
however, is that Canguilhem does not think it matters. Whether there is a sharp
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

distinction between the made and the born or not, tools and machines are exten-
szons ofthe body. They are part of life.
T h e next way in which Canguilhem's statement seems to run against the dic-
tionaries is that tools are defined as relatively simple and commonly applied by
hand; machines are more complex and work apart from us. Both are outside us.
Canguilhem held that to be compatible with the notion that tools and machines
extend the body. They are parts of the living organism, not parts with which it
was born, but parts which it has made. Canguilhem speaks of an 'organic pro-
jection' (1952: 153) which prompted the creation of the first tools, and which
continues through the most sophisticated machines. This was not an original
idea. He cites the classic writing on the philosophy of technology by Alfred
Espinas (1897), and numerous earlier German contributors to the topic. He
thought we learn less from engineers doing the history of technology than from
ethnographers (1952: 152). (English-speaking readers, who want to know where
Bruno Latour and other present-day French iconoclasts are coming from, may
want to read more Canguilhem.) He says the starting point for understanding is
Darwin's Descent qf Mun: Instruments and Weapons Emplqyed by Animals. Can-
guilhem may have blurred more boundaries, in 1947, with specific argument and
example, than Haraway did forty years later, by decree.
Yet we resist his idea. We have all been taught a strong contrast between arte-
facts and living things. Perhaps our prejudice precedes teaching. Many develop-
mental psychologists, who may be thought of as intellectually descended from an
unlikely mating of Piaget and Chomsky, now claim that children in our society are,
in experimental conditions, able to distinguish artefacts from living things at an
incredibly early age (e.g. Gelman et al. 1995). It is almost as if there is a built-in
developmental 'module' (something virtually or truly innate) that clicks in at
about 3 years of age, and enables a child to distinguish life from artefacts. Develop-
mental psychologists, although favourable to ideas of innate cognitive modules,
do not claim we are stuck with our inheritance. We can learn to replace old cat-
egories of cultural or genetic inheritance by new ones, as when we replace the
 206 Ian Hacking

common taxonomies for plants and animals by ones based upon evolutionary sys-
tematic biology. (Tree, vine, bush and grass are classifications for local people who
live anywhere that there are trees, vines, bushes or grasses, but these categories do
not occur in contemporary botany.) Canguilhem's statement is encouraging us to
revise the ways in which we think of tools and machines, even if we have to revise
our earliest preconceptions. Think of them as extensions of the body.
Tools and machines do not cover the waterfront. Clothing, shoes, do these
extend the body? Not as tool or machine. A bicycle is not quite a tool or a
machine, but it is my favourite candidate for an extension of the body, because
it is so much part of my bodily equilibrium system when I am riding. I do not
just use it. Without knowing how, I am able to correct for all but the worst even-
tualities. I have stayed in balance after skidding wildly on the ice, and even after
having been knocked by a car. The worst skids, and the worst knocks, unbalance
me, but the same is true walking. Is a bicycle a machine? I hesitate to say so.
English language dictionaries say a bicycle is a vehicle, which does not seem right
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

to me, but what else would do? French dictionaries say that a vilocipide or bicy-
clette is an appareil (de locomotion); unlike French and German, we are not so
generous with 'apparatus'. I do not think we should fuss with ordinary lan-
guage(~)here. 'Tools or machines' is a loose heading that includes bicycles.

Free-standing machines

There is a quite different problem with the statement that machines are organs.
Tools in the common meaning of the word - chisels and power saws, garden
tools, stone axes - are commonly held in or close to the hand. Hence the idea of
extending the body comes naturally enough. But many machines are out there
on their own, free-standing. They may be manufactured (which once meant
made by human hand) and certainly they are provided with energy by human
beings, whether the energy source be wind, water, a wind-up spring, coal, petrol,
electricity or nuclear fission. But then they run off on their own. Descartes had
few enough examples to serve him - watches, the clock at Strasbourg. But he
had the genius to see the future.
Does the fact that machines are free-standing matter? T h e invention of the
word 'postmodern' has led to a little competition in which people try to define
the modern era, something that began in the past and is now apparently over,
posted into history. Bruno Latour's ([1994]1995) entry tried to disqualify the
competition, We Have Never Been Modern. The modern would be the sharp dis-
tinction between the natural and the social, but, despite our talk, we never did
make that distinction, argues Latour. Andrew Pickering's (1997) entry is in part
a response to Latour.
Pickering observes that there is a fundamental passage from tools (in the most
general or even metaphorical use of the term) to machines. Some tools are,
perhaps, machines: the electric drill, the chainsaw. A great many machines,
however, are free-standing, started and fed by people, but running on their own.
 Canguilhem amid the cyborgs 207

Pickering's examples are the cannon (fed gunpowder, pointed, and ignited, then
it does its thing) and the spinning jenny. I am not quite sure why he does not go
as far back as the Cartesian clock, but no matter. I am not quite sure why the
windmill, Leibniz's favourite machine, is not an instance. What about the
trebuchet, the mighty siege engine (as it was called) of the late Middle Ages,
which made the castle almost obsolete as a place of refuge from attacking armies?
So far as I can see, in all ways relevant to Pickering, the trebuchet has exactly the
same properties as the cannon. You put it in place, you load it, you arrange the
energy source (gravity), and it hurls a devastating missile hundreds of feet high
and far. It differs in that it is so massive, and takes so long to construct, that you
can use it only against a sedentary castle. Perhaps Pickering's point is that,
around the turn of the eighteenth century, machines began to proliferate. They
were plainly different from nature and humanity. Today we perceive them as sep-
arate, even if we design and tend them, and even if, as Descartes insisted, they
still work according to the laws of nature.
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

Pickering dates modernity with the advent of the free-standing machine. He

wants that to be about 1800, although I am not sure that a more familiar entry
in the competition, namely the Cartesian era, with its enthusiasm for clocks and
automata, is not the answer that follows from his own analysis. Yet the date does
not matter. What makes Pickering's claim interesting is that he would define
what others name the modern era with the invention or proliferation of free-
standing machines.
A byproduct of Pickering's idea is a question for Canguilhem: if machines are
organs, is the spinning jenny an organ? Or an organism? As I understand Can-
guilhem, he wants us to take seriously the idea that machines too are extensions
of the body. He was an historian who took ethnography seriously. He well knew
that there had been constant shifts in the relation between organism and machine
(witness the servomechanism that he himself alluded to). Nevertheless he did
want to discourage, from the very beginning, the conception of the machine as
other. Even if in the end we resist the notion that machines are extensions of the
body - just because they are too far from the body - they are an extension of l@,
of vitality, of living force; or, to repeat another word used above, a projection of
life.
Life, by itself, does not mean human life. Bacteria are alive, worms are alive.
Perhaps a number of species are on the verge of making what we can call tools.
Whether or not nature is red in tooth and claw, life is certainly not always lovely
or friendly. Albert Schweitzer preached reverence for life, but that did not stop
him stamping on the dreadful spiders that invaded his hospice at Lambarene.
There is far less false sentiment in Canguilhem than in Schweitzer. His 'vital-
ism', as it has been called, is a way of looking at the world, including our cre-
ations, that cuts across the mechanism that has been thrust on us ever since
Descartes. Could we say that Pickering, with his emphasis on the machine as
different, is still Cartesian?
Canguilhem was truly non-Cartesian. I am not sure that I follow every path
in his suggestive assertion that the doctrine of the animal-machine is tied to the
 208 Zan Huckirzg

cogito and hence to dualism about mind and body. He does seem to me to have
been more assuredly anti-dualist than the vast proportion of those philosophers
who confidently spit on dualism, the individualistic ego, and so forth, all the
while pursuing Cartesian projects without noticing it. That is because he stood
upon an entirely different platform than the anti-Cartesian Anglophones. Mind
and body were, for Canguilhem, aspects of living creatures, most especially of
human beings. Noam Chomsky and Donald Davidson (1986) are as keen as
Descartes to say that animals cannot judge, cannot think, cannot talk. For Can-
guilhem these are not the fundamental distinctions. Even questions such as 'Can
machines think?' might be answered, in the spirit of his writing, 'Well, have we
in fact made any thinking machines yet?' We have to ponder the matter, but we
should not start from a fundamental opposition between machine and organism.
A particularly fertile site on which to deploy this vision is the cyborg.
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

Cyborgs

Cyborgs have become the stuff of science fiction, and, since Donna Haraway's
([l9851 1991) championing of the cyborg as a genderless future being, have
excited both feminists and people who do science studies. Since many of us enter
this topic believing that cyborgs are rooted in fiction, I would like to plant them
in fact. Haraway, grand master of blurring, gleefully demolishes the distinction
between fact and fiction, but I still find it useful.
The word 'cyborg' was first used in print in the September 1960 issue of
Astronuutics. It came with a definition: 'For the exogenously extended organiz-
ational complex functioning as an integrated system unconsciously, we propose
the name ' "Cyborg" ' (Clynes and Kline [l96011996a: 3 1).
The name was made up by Manfred Clynes working with Nathan Kline.
Kline was a distinguished clinical psychiatrist, director of research at Rockland
State Hospital in New York, and teacher at Columbia University. His forte was
psychopharmacology. Those who consult the Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1996a)
will learn that he won numerous awards, some internal to his profession (the
Adolph Meyer award) and some more public (a New York Newspaper Guild
Page One Award in Science). He was a good deal more colourful that that. He
was Papa Doc Duvalier's personal psychiatric consultant, and he also established
clinics in Haiti. The favours were mutual: he had a fine private collection of
Haitian, popularly known asvoodoo, preparations and herbals, with which he is
said to have experimented freely. He was adviser on psychological topics to
Hollywood producer Norman Lear, so whatever psychology appears in Lear's
movies or T V scripts had Kline's imprimatur. (This supplementary information
is derived from telephone interviews with family members.) Kline was no
shrinking violet.
Clynes, born in 1925, is one of those marvellous people who emigrated from
Europe in the Nazi time. We are familiar with the family setting: father an engi-
neer, naval architect and inventor; mother a gifted amateur singer and writer;
 Cunguilhern amid the c)/horgs 209

uncle a baritone in the Vienna Opera. The family got to Australia in 1938 and,
as soon as he was able, Clynes got a job in a factory. At the University of Mel-
bourne he did a degree in both music and science. He went to the Juilliard school
in New York, became a distinguished concert pianist in Australia, and then went
on the world concert circuit. Meanwhile he won a Fulbright scholarship to
Princeton, did some physics, and became a control engineer in industry. Then
he was invited by Kline to do medical research at Rockland State Hospital. There
he developed the CAT scan (I suppose few people even know that this stands for
Computerized Axial Tomography, but most know that it is an invaluable inven-
tion for finding out what is wrong with your insides, especially your head.) In
Clynes' own opinion, 'It revolutionized the measurement of electrical events in
the brain'. (After this he went back to music, to study with Pablo Casals.) There
has been a whole series of further patents and discoveries. Clynes always had
contempt for traditional academic and even clinical psychology, and thought the
early computer people had the good ideas.
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

Well before the CAT scan, Clynes had done work on feedback control of heart
rate, assisted by early computers and biofeedback. 'One of the first useful appli-
cations of computers to biological control systems.' And cyborgs? Once you
think of biofeedback by computer you are in place. The American space adminis-
tration, NASA, seems to have wanted Kline to do something psychopharma-
ceutical for astronauts. He talked with Clynes. These were not men given to small
ideas. When they thought about it, the real problem was to free a human being
from the environment, especially a human-hostile environment like space.
Hence the idea of the cyborg. We have evolved to fit in with gravit?; oxygen
levels and so forth. In a space module we do our best to carry that environment
with us. Kline and Clynes: let us free ourselves from our environment. 'If man
in space must constantly be checking on things and making adjustments merely
in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose
of the Cyborg . . . is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-
like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free
to explore, to create, to think, and to feel' (Clynes and Kline [1960]1996a: 31).
T h e point was to supplement a human being, to make it possible to exist, qua
man, as man, 'not changing his nature, his human nature that evolved here' (Clynes
in Gray 1996b: 47, emphasis added). The first cyborg was a rat, which had an
osmotic pump which injected chemicals into the rat, and modified the injections
as the rat responded. Lafi magazine had a big photo of the cyborg rat soon after
a small photo appeared in Astronuutics.
At first sight there appears to be a certain ingenuousness in Clynes's confi-
dence that rat-nature or human-nature, as it evolved on earth, is left unchanged
as a lot of metabolic (and so forth) chemicals are pumped into the organism.
Clynes seems to be an astonishingly Cartesian dualist. We use a system of
machines (computers) and chemicals to modify the body, so that the mind can
be left free to explore, to create, to think, to imagine. T h e 'human nature' that is
left unchanged is mental stuff, the product of evolution, for sure, but quite dis-
tinct from the body that is incorporated in the feedback loop.
 210 Ian Hacking

And yet there is another twist in this story that I cannot omit. It has a lot to
do with the mind, though here one imagines that it is Kline speaking, not Clynes.
It interests me because Rewriting the Soul (Hacking 1995) is, among other things,
a very extensive study of multiple personality and dissociation. Kline was appar-
ently stirring the dissociative soup way back in 1960:
hypnosis per se may prove to have a definite place in space travel, although
there is much to be learned about the phenomena of dissociation, generaliza-
tion of instructions, and abdication of executive control.
We are now working on a new preparation which may greatly enhance
hypnotizability, so that pharmacological and hypnotic researches may be
symbiotically combined.
(Clynes and Kline [1960]1996)
Ross (1996) is a book written by a leader in the field of dissociative disorder sug-
gesting that the epidemic of disturbed people having flashbacks of alien abduc-
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

tion into outer space is due to what he calls 'CIA' experiments in hypnosis, drugs
and mind control in the 1960s. T h e unhappy people with these memories are
really recalling trance states induced by mad scientists in the employ of the
United States Government. Most readers, including myself, take this as proof
that Ross is himself a bit touched. But now I wonder, what was going on at Rock-
ford State?
I could not resist that aside on matters that independently I find quite dis-
turbing. To return to cyborgs, in 1960 it was probably Clynes who was keen on
leaving the mind as it is, and who was Cartesian, while Kline was into mind
control with a vengeance. But the cyborg was Clynes's idea. As first intended, it
was dualist. The body was modified so it could live in alien environments, while
the human mind went on creating, exploring, thinking.

Sentics

T h e story of Clynes and the cyborg has not yet finished. In 1970 Astronautics
asked Clynes for another essay, but declined to print it when they got it. Genuine
futurists are truly disconcerting. People out in space, said Clynes, are going to
need emotions. 'Apparently innate modes of expression of emotion are also,
among other things, innately very much related to the direction and strength of
gravitation' (Clynes [1970]1996: 36). He was prompted to ask another of his
remarkable questions: 'How can man be authentic in space? ([1970]1996: 36, orig-
inal emphasis). Human beings must express emotions, or, as Descartes would
put it, the passions of the soul. At that juncture Clynes, who was at Berkeley at
the time, fell under the sway of a North Californian psychology, a certain Ameri-
can Sentic Association with headquarters in Sonoma (in the NapaValley). Pace
Haraway, truth is stranger than fiction. In Sentics, you listened to a tape, which
included among other things the names of certain emotions uttered at random
intervals (emotionless, anger, hate, grief, love, sex, joy, reverence). You thought
 Canguilhem amid the cyborgs 21 1

these emotions, expressing them on your face. This in itself reinforced the
emotion, at least according to a theory entertained by Clynes. So you came to
feel the emotions. At the end of a session, the subject felt calm and relaxed,
having lived out a full emotional life. This was how the cyborg, the human in
space, hooked up to a computer controlled bio-feedback system, would remain
human, expressing emotions even though lacking the presence of their objects.
You may not disagree with the editorial judgement of Astronautics. What is
striking about the rejected paper is the persistent Cartesianism. The body has
evolved in this environment; it will be turned into a cybernetic organism, part
body, part machine, an animal-machine indeed. As Descartes might have put it,
this is a designed machine added to a living machine. And then there is the mind,
the soul with its passions. The lonely astronaut on his trip to Mars will stay
human by engaging in New Age computer-mediated meditation, not so far
removed from the practices of solitary monks of long ago. I imagine a sentic tape
with Gregorian chants. In this way the soul will remain human, and man in space
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

will remain authentic.

The cyborgs t h a t got away

What of the science fiction cyborg? Clynes was 'horrified' when he saw the E r -
minator movies (Gray 1996b: 47). They 'dehumanized' the concept of the cyborg
completely: a travesty, a 'monsterification'. When Clynes proposed the idea of
the cyborg, it was plainly as a computer-aided bio-feedback system using the
injection of chemicals, with wider, teleological horizons beyond. But, on reflec-
tion, he said it was absurd to monsterify cyborgs, just as it would be absurd to
say that a man who reads a book becomes an inhuman monster just because he
becomes extended by the pages in front of him. A person who puts on glasses
has already changed. 'When he rides a bicycle he virtually has become a cyborg'
(Gray 1996b: 49). The example suits better than, say, extending the body with a
keyboard at one's finger-tips, because learning to ride a bicycle involves learning
to keep your balance, a feedback feat indeed.
His visit to the cinema to watch Terminator was another occasion when Clynes
was disingenuous. He could have expected cyborg-abuse, and should not have
been surprised and horrified. The cyborg meets Zeus. Supermen and women
seem to be part of the human cultural condition, whether in the form of gods,
Greek or otherwise, heroes and heroines, Greek or otherwise, or simply the
caped crusader (Superman himself), Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman, Super-
heroes as they are called. They are a projection of our fantasies about ourselves.
It was not in the least surprising that the name 'cyborg' should have become
affixed to a whole new breed of supers, especially super-villains. The name
'cyborg' sounds evil. When Clynes first mouthed it to Kline, Kline said, 'It
sounds like a town in Denmark'. If we must be Scandinavian, it sounds like a
troll to me. Tolkien could have chosen it for one of the evil powers in The Lord
of the Rings.
 212 Ian Hacking

T h e cyborgs of science fiction are not, in general, enhanced mice or people.

They come into the world, it seems, rather like Adam and Eve in Bernard Shaw's
interminable play, Back to Methuselah, hatched whole, adult, without the pains
of childhood and adolescence, and without discernible family histories. There
must be endless variations that I have not encountered, but cyborgs tend to be
big, sort of mechanical but also sort of organic; there is seldom the organic being
upon which or in which a bio-feedback mechanism has been implanted. They
are, however, correctly described as alive, living. There is also a strong sense in
which the Descartes/Canguilhem insight is correct. These beings are not
designed by their creators, their authors, out of nothing. They are patterned
upon living beings, upon human beings, for the most part. In Clynes' vision, a
cyborg-tree must make perfectly good sense. Maybe our astronaut will plant one
on Mars, aided by bio-feedback to grow in the alien soil. But a cyborg-tree, qua
cyborg, is not going to hack it at the movies.
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

Cyborg as metaphor: the cyborg manifesto

Donna Haraway's 'A cyborg manifesto' ([1985]1991) was the launching pad for
cyborg metaphors in both feminism and science-and-technology studies.
Haraway excels at verbal play and metaphor. For the pedantic outsider, her model
for cyborgs comes from fiction, not from Manfred Clynes, but, as noted earlier,
she is brilliant at intertwining fact and fiction. Facts make fictions and fictions
can, not only mould the interpretation of facts, but make facts themselves.
Cyborgs fascinate Haraway because they help blur the distinctions mentioned
above, machine and organism, natural and artificial, mind and body, self-
developing and externally designed. Yes, they do help blur things, although I
have been saying that Canguilhem was there in mid-century without cyborgs.
Yet there is one central difference between the cyborg visions of Haraway and
of Clynes. Haraway is with the monsters, who need have no history, no fall from
grace, no paradise lost, no mother, no Oedipal relationships, and, of cardinal
importance for her, no gender. Casting about for a model for socialist-feminists
to strive for, she proposes the cyborg itself. Whereas many feminists have resisted
technology as an aspect of patriarchal dominance, Haraway, always intensely
aware of her own paradoxes, says, in part, embrace technology, embrace a tech-
nology that reaches far past any existing reality. Let us become cyborgs, not
bodies enhanced with computerized bio-feedback, but bodies without a prehis-
tory. In such a community gender will, to say the least, be transformed.
In an interview, Clynes was asked about an idea of Hans Moravec, of down-
loading a human consciousness into a machine. Then gender would become
unnecessary or irrelevant. Clynes replied that the cyborg - a man or a woman
who has been enhanced with computerized bio-feedback - has in no way had
sexual identity altered. It is the person's original 'brain circuitry that engenders
sexual feelings' (Gray 1996b: 49). In no way does altering the body to live in
another environment change the emotions - 'no more than riding a bicycle does'.
 Canguilhem amid the cyborgs 213

And: 'the idea of cyborg in no wa.y implies a n it. It's a he or a she'(Gray 199613: 48,
original italics). (I imagine Haraway having read this sentence, and then mis-
chievously reversing it in her essay.)
Clynes put the cyborg idea out into the world. The moment he did so, he
ceased to own it. He ceased to have authority about what should be meant by the
word. This happens all the time. No one committed an error in monsterifica-
tion. Clynes offered a word and an idea that suggested endless play; imaginative
people saw that, and ran with the word and idea. Then Haraway moved in with
what they had created, and played with more metaphors.
That discourse spins away from life on earth, and yet we have a curious
simulacrum of the original position, of Descartes, God and the animal-machine.
Canguilhem reminded us that God, in manufacturing a body, an animal-
machine, would still be modelling this artefact upon a creature, a created
creature. That is, the machine, even if pure machine, would still be modelled
upon life. In fiction, the author plays God, and models the cyborg, the quasi-
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

organic machine, or quasi-mechanical organism, on human beings, much in the

way that the heroes of old or of the comics are modelled on us.

Cyborg as metaphor: couplings

As time passes many more metaphors will cluster around the cyborg. As my final
example I take Andrew Pickering's 'Cyborg history' (1995). Pickering is perhaps
the most materialistic of people who engage in Social Studies of Knowledge, or
Science and Technology Studies, or other named fields whose practitioners in-
groupily refer to themselves by acronyms (SSK, STS, etc.). Whereas many
workers in these domains emphasize a purely social approach to knowledge,
science and so forth, Pickering has always insisted that material things are not
only the objects of much research, but also have active powers of their own which
resist research projects, and to which the projects must accommodate them-
selves.
Workers in these fields mostly write histories, albeit very local ones. Often
these have been called case studies. They are histories of events commonly
involving only a small number of people, what Kuhn once called the disciplinary
matrix of one hundred or so workers. T h e more socially inclined of these his-
torians often embed their local history in some larger social history. Pickering
has long insisted on material history, histories of people, laboratories, patrons,
but most interestingly of instruments. He invokes the apparatus, substances,
which are an integral part of the story, and which he presents, not exactly as
agents, but at least as (in a curious phrase that looks like a passive tense) 'having
agency'. Histories of science and technology should be histories of couplings
between the human and the artefact. The artefact, in the world, interacting with
the people in the world, is not to be thought of as strictly inanimate. When
laboratory workers swear at their apparatus for not working, they are not making
a category mistake, confusing the animate with the wholly inanimate.
 214 Ian Hacking

A cyborg is formed by the coupling of computer-managed bio-feedback

devices to an organism, in order to enable the organism to live in a new environ-
ment without deliberately modifying the environment, or itself It is the coup-
ling of organism and machine. With a grand sweep of the hand Pickering
generalizes the cyborg idea to any coupling of people and machines.
Although Pickering frequently uses the word 'cyborg', says he is doing
cyborg history, and ends by discussing 'the cyborgization of industry', I have
some difficulty figuring out which items are cyborgs. Occasionally it appears
that the 'hybridization of science and the military' results in a cyborg, which
would suggest that this enormous society of people and things is a cyborg. But
on other occasions the cyborg seems very much in the spirit of Clynes on his
bicycle. Feedback systems are of the essence, starting with radar, involving
operations research, and devices such as anti-aircraft guns which track aircraft;
there indeed we have an enhanced gunner. One project under Norbert Wiener
seems to have aimed at eliminating the gunner altogether, creating a truly free-
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

standing anti-aircraft gun, tended when defective, but otherwise started and left
on guard.
T h e cyborg, then, is a living idea. Pickering concludes his avant-garde essay
by discussing the introduction of automated machine tools at a Caterpillar
tractor factory. The automated machine tools may readily be seen as cyborgs -
but not thereby as separate from life in Canguilhem's vision. Recall his state-
ment in 1952 that servomechanisms and electronic automata shift the relation
between machine and organism, but not its direction. But Pickering, as I under-
stand him, takes the entire factory to be a cyborg, a coupling of workers and
machines. Metaphors proliferate in these domains. Here we have a society of
cyborgs becoming a cyborg. But why not? Marvin Minsky, a founding member
of what is now called the cognitive revolution in psychology, wrote a popular
book titled The Society of Mind (1986) in which mind itself is portrayed as a
society of interacting mental modules.

This is the end of death

Haraway uses fictional cyborgs as a metaphor for genderless freedom. Pickering

uses cyborgs as a metaphor for real factories. I should conclude with cyborgs
closer to Clynes and closer to home. T h e Canguilhem conference was held on
14 September 1996. That was also the long weekend for the annual meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science. There the audience
heard about bio-engineers in Utah working with some blind subjects. They
installed a computer chip in the back of the head, and connected it to the visual
cortex of a blind person, who was then able to get a rudimentary sort of vision,
grainy but not negligible. 'Professor Thomas said that within three decades,
computers inside people's heads might be a commonplace. They would provide
people with undreamt-of forms of communication and computer-powered
memories' (Nuttall and Hawkes 1996).
 Canguilhem amid the cyborgs 215

I n the same vein, a little earlier in the year, one could read of a smaller venue,
Belstead Brook hospital in Ipswich, where one heard that within thirty years -
the magic number, we may note from the previous paragraph -
it would be possible to produce a computer chip small and powerful enough
to be transplanted into nerves behind the eye and used to record every sight,
thought and sensation in a person's life from cradle to grave.
'This is the end of death' [said Chris Winter, head of research into 'arti-
ficial life' at British Telecommunications]. 'We envisage that all we think, all
our emotions and creative brain activity will be able to be copied o n to silicon.
This is immortality in the truest sense - future generations will not die!
(Connor 1996)
Haraway wins the match: fact, fiction and hype are now engaged in an embrace
so passionate that all boundaries melt away. I conclude only by reiterating
Canguilhem's message. Here we read of cyborgs in the purest and original sense
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013

intended by Clynes. T h e only difference is that this seems to be a post-Cartesian

Clynesian vision, of cyborgs whose very minds and bodies are one. I can only
conclude with Canguilhem's original message of 1947, updated to 1997. T h e
man at British Telecommunications may head the department of artificial life,
but that is an oxymoron. He heads a department of one of the (future?) life
sciences.

Uniaersitj~o f Toronto

References
Canguilhem, Georges (1952) La
Connaissance de la cie, Paris: Hachette.
Chomsky, Noam (1 962) Cartesian
Linguistics: A Chapter in the History o f a
Rationalist Theory of Mind, New York:
Harper & Row.
Clynes, Manfred E. ([1970]1996)
'Cyborg 11: Sentic space travel', in Gray
(1996a), pp. 3542.
Clynes, Manfred E. and Kline, Nathan
S. ([1960]1996) 'Cyborgs and space', in
Gray (1996a), pp. 29-33.
Connor, Steve (1996) 'Small wonder',
The Sundajl Times, 21 July: 14.
Davidson, Donald (1986) A Rational
Animal, The Lindley Lecture at the
University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas:
University of Kansas Press.
Espinas, Alfred (1897) Le.7 Orzgine.~de Ia
technologie, Paris.
Gelman, Rochel et al. (1995)
'Distinguishing between animates and
inanimates: not by motion alone', in Dan
Sperber et al. (eds) Causal Cognition,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gray, Chris Hables (1996a) The Cjlborg
Handbook, New York and London:
Routledge.
--- (1996b) 'An interview with Manfred
Clynes', in Gray (1996a), pp. 43-53.
Hacking, Ian (1995) Rewritzng the Soul:
Multiple Personality and the Sciences o f
Memory, Princeton, N J : Princeton
University Press.
Haraway, Donna ([1985]1991) 'A cyborg
manifesto: science, technology and
socialist-feminism in the late twentieth
century', in Szmians, Cyborgs and Women,
New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno ([l99411995) We Have
Nerer Been Modern, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Minsky, Marvin (1986) The Society o f
Mind, New York: Simon & Schuster.
 216 Ian Hacking
Nuttall, Nick and Hawkes, Nigel
(1996) 'Computer implant gives sight to
the blind', The Times, 14 September: 8.
Pickering, Andrew (1995) 'Cyborg
history and the World War I1 regime',
Perspectives on Science 111: 1-48.
Downloaded by [Istanbul Universitesi Kutuphane ve Dok] at 18:00 15 August 2013
---- (1997) 'An evolutionary theory of
STS', unpublished ms.
Ross, Colin A. (1996) Satanic Ritual
Abuse, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.